HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL: Here's some food for
thought for 2008:
(author Robert Jensen, University of Texas)
Here's what white privilege sounds like:
I am sitting in my University of Texas office,
talking to a very bright
and very conservative white student about
affirmative action in college
admissions, which he opposes and I support.
The student says he wants a level playing field
with no unearned
advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he
thinks
that in the United
States being white has advantages. Have either of
us, I ask, ever
benefited from being white in a world run mostly
by
white people? Yes,
he concedes, there is something real and tangible
we could call white
privilege.
So, if we live in a world of white
privilege--unearned white
privilege--how does that affect your notion of a
level playing field? I
ask.
He paused for a moment and said, "That really
doesn't matter."
That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the
ultimate white
privilege: the privilege to acknowledge you have
unearned privilege but
ignore what it means.
That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk
about
race and racism
with students. It drove home to me the importance
of
confronting the
dirty secret that we white people carry around
with
us everyday: In a
world of white privilege, some of what we have is
unearned. I think much
of both the fear and anger that comes up around
discussions of
affirmative action has its roots in that secret.
So
these days, my goal
is to talk openly and honestly about white
supremacy
and white
privilege.
White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is
complex. In a white
supremacist culture, all white people have
privilege, whether or not
they are overtly racist themselves. There are
general patterns, but such
privilege plays out differently depending on
context
and other aspects
of one's identity (in my case, being male gives me
other kinds of
privilege). Rather than try to tell others how
white
privilege has
played out in their lives, I talk about how it has
affected me.
I am as white as white gets in this country. I am
of northern European
heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one
of
the whitest states in
the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white
world surrounded by
racism, both personal and institutional. Because
I
didn't live near a
reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the
state's only numerically
significant non-white population, American
Indians.
I have struggled to resist that racist training
and
the ongoing racism
of my culture. I like to think I have changed,
even
though I routinely
trip over the lingering effects of that
internalized racism and the
institutional racism around me. But no matter how
much I "fix" myself,
one thing never changes--I walk through the world
with white privilege.
What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly,
when
I seek admission to
a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an
apartment, I don't look
threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating
me
for those things
look like me--they are white. They see in me a
reflection of themselves,
and in a racist world that is an advantage. I
smile.
I am white. I am
one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice
critical opinions, I
am cut some slack. After all, I'm white.
My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I
am
white. Some complain
that affirmative action has meant the university
is
saddled with
mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt
there
are minority faculty
who are mediocre, though I don't know very many.
As
Henry Louis Gates
Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action
policies were in place for
the next hundred years, it's possible that at the
end of that time the
university could have as many mediocre minority
professors as it has
mediocre white professors. That isn't meant as an
insult to anyone, but
is a simple observation that white privilege has
meant that scores of
second-rate white professors have slid through the
system because their
flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on
race, as well as on
gender, class and ideology.
Some people resist the assertions that the United
States is still a
bitterly racist society and that the racism has
real effects on real
people. But white folks have long cut other white
folks a break. I know,
because I am one of them.
I am not a genius--as I like to say, I'm not the
sharpest knife in the
drawer. I have been teaching full-time for six
years, and I've published
a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is
the unexceptional
stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of
it,
I would argue,
actually is worth reading. I work hard, and I like
to think that I'm a
fairly decent teacher. Every once in awhile, I
leave
my office at the
end of the day feeling like I really accomplished
something. When I cash
my paycheck, I don't feel guilty.
But, all that said, I know I did not get where I
am
by merit alone. I
benefited from, among other things, white
privilege. That doesn't mean
that I don't deserve my job, or that if I weren't
white I would never
have gotten the job. It means simply that all
through my life, I have
soaked up benefits for being white. I grew up in
fertile farm country
taken by force from non-white indigenous people. I
was educated in a
well-funded, virtually all-white public school
system in which I learned
that white people like me made this country great.
There I also was
taught a variety of skills, including how to take
standardized tests
written by and for white people.
All my life I have been hired for jobs by white
people. I was accepted
for graduate school by white people. And I was
hired for a teaching
position at the predominantly white University of
Texas, which had a
white president, in a college headed by a white
dean and in a department
with a white chairman that at the time had one
non-white tenured
professor.
There certainly is individual variation in
experience. Some white people
have had it easier than me, probably because they
came from wealthy
families that gave them even more privilege. Some
white people have had
it tougher than me because they came from poorer
families. White women
face discrimination I will never know. But, in
the
end, white people all
have drawn on white privilege somewhere in their
lives.
Like anyone, I have overcome certain hardships in
my
life. I have worked
hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay
there. But to feel good
about myself and my work, I do not have to believe
that "merit," as
defined by white people in a white country, alone
got me here. I can
acknowledge that in addition to all that hard
work,
I got a significant
boost from white privilege, which continues to
protect me every day of
my life from certain hardships.
At one time in my life, I would not have been
able
to say that, because
I needed to believe that my success in life was
due
solely to my
individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the
heroic American, the
rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by
the culture's mythology
that I couldn't see the fear that was binding me
to
those myths. Like
all white Americans, I was living with the fear
that maybe I didn't
really deserve my success, that maybe luck and
privilege had more to do
with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I
wasn't heroic or
rugged, that I wasn't special.
I let go of some of that fear when I realized
that,
indeed, I wasn't
special, but that I was still me. What I do well,
I
still can take pride
in, even when I know that the rules under which I
work in are stacked in
my benefit. I believe that until we let go of the
fiction that people
have complete control over their fate--that we
can
will ourselves to be
anything we choose--then we will live with that
fear. Yes, we should all
dream big and pursue our dreams and not let
anyone
or anything stop us.
But we all are the product both of what we will
ourselves to be and what
the society in which we live lets us be.
White privilege is not something I get to decide
whether or not I want
to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the
same
time as a black man
and the security guard follows him and leaves me
alone to shop, I am
benefiting from white privilege. There is not
space
here to list all the
ways in which white privilege plays out in our
daily
lives, but it is
clear that I will carry this privilege with me
until
the day white
supremacy is erased from this society.
Frankly, I don't think I will live to see that
day;
I am realistic about
the scope of the task. However, I continue to
have
hope, to believe in
the creative power of human beings to engage the
world honestly and act
morally. A first step for white people, I think,
is
to not be afraid to
admit that we have benefited from white
privilege.
It doesn't mean we
are frauds who have no claim to our success. It
means we face a choice
about what we do with our success.
Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism
in
the University of
Texas at Austin. He can be reached at
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
God seldom becomes a reality
until God becomes a necessity!
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